Climate Audit requested of the Australian BoM and CSIRO

A team of skeptical scientists, citizens, and an Australian Senator have lodged a formal request with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) to have the BOM and CSIRO audited.

The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%. The stakes are high. Australians could have to pay something in the order of $870 million dollars thanks to the Kyoto protocol, and the first four years of the Emissions Trading Scheme was expected to cost Australian industry (and hence Australian shareholders and consumers) nearly $50 billion dollars.

Given the stakes, the Australian people deserve to know they are getting transparent, high quality data from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The small cost of the audit is nothing in comparison with the money at stake for all Australians. We need the full explanations of why individual stations have been adjusted repeatedly and non-randomly, and why adjustments were made decades after the measurements were taken. We need an audit of surface stations. (Are Australian stations as badly manipulated and poorly sited as the US stations? Who knows?)

The NZ equivalent to the Australian BOM is under an official review

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition found adjustments that were even more inexplicable (0.006 degrees was adjusted up to 0.9 degrees). They decided to push legally and the response was a litany of excuses — until finally The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was forced to disavow it’s own National Temperature Records, and belatedly pretend that it had never been intended for public consumption. But here’s the thing that bites: NZ signed the Kyoto protocol, arguably based very much on the NZ temperature record, and their nation owes somewhere from half a billion to several billion dollars worth of carbon credits (depending on the price of carbon in 2012). Hence there is quite a direct link from the damage caused by using one unsubstantiated data set based on a single student’s report that no one can find or replicate that will cost the nation a stack of money. NIWA is now potentially open to class actions. (Ironically, the Australian BOM has the job of “ratifying” the reviewed NZ temperature record.)

Thanks to work by Ken Stewart, Chris Gillham, Andrew Barnham, Tony Cox, James Doogue, David Stockwell, as well as Cory Bernardi, Federal Senator for South Australia.

Sorry guys, this won’t happen.
Once Julia gets wind of this, you’ll find there will be a massive funding cut to the Australian National Audit Office because all the money has gone fixing up the flood damage in Queensland.

Really, do you think the guvmint will let this happen, after all, they have a pretty good track record at feeding mushrooms !

This will go nowhere. The Auditor will prioritise tasks and this won’t make it anywhere near the top of the pile. That’s the way Australian Government works.
We have an Australian Transportation Safety board modeled on the US NTSB. Ours however has only the resources to investigate 100 aviation accidents and incidents a year. They start with International airlines and work down from there. Private aviation accidents are rarely more than summarily investigated.
I have no faith in non interference with the auditor. A quiet word in someone’s ear who passes it on through another couple of cut outs and the auditor gets worded up over Friday night drinkies that a bunch of ratbags are trying to undermine the integrity of the BoM.
This will sink without a trace.

Leaving to one side motivation that may be the result of ideology and/or the application of the precautionary principle, it is grossly negligent of any government to sign up to this level of expenditure without at least confirming the accuracy of the temperature record.

Accordingly, one would have expected at the very minimum that each country would carry out an independent audit of their own temperature record (which is freely within their control), and as far as possible an independent audit of the global temperature record. Each and every adjustment to raw data should be noted, analysed and the reasons underpinning the adjustment fully explained. I am off the view that it is a dereliction of public office/duty if the government official in charge of environmental/climate issues does not commission such independent audit.

Suit ought to lie against any government that does not exhibit at least that minimum duty of care towards its citizens. Perhaps if enough citizens write to their respective MPs/Senators/Congressmen (what have you) expressing the view that it would be a dereliction of public office/duty to fail to carry out an independent audit and reserving ones rights to proceed against the MP/Senators/Congressmen and/or the government in the situation where no such independent audit is carried out, just may be (I would not put it any higher than that) the ‘politicians’ may come to their senses and look into this issue.

1) The audit office support the process and we are able to find out exactly what has been going on in BOM and determine whether it has been ideologically infected
2) Various forces try and bury it and we can understand how deeply the system has been corrupted and to what extent cauterization is required.

Concerned Australian Taxpayer: “That is a poke. How do you know there is a pig in it?”

Australian Govt: “We have bought a pig. The pig is within the poke. We have a consensus about the pig, so there is no need to check inside.”

Concerned Australian Taxpayer: “Fifty BILLION dollars of taxpayer monies will be paid for this particular pig – wouldn’t it be fiscally prudent to verify the quality of the pig that is, supposedly, in the poke?

Australian Govt: “We have bought a pig. The pig is within the poke. Your questions are very troubling – are you questioning the Australian Govt.? You should take our word for it – we are very smart and talented and we have in mind the best interests of the planet and all the creatures on it. And we have a consensus about the pig, so we shall not waste any time checking inside the poke.”

Concerned Australian Taxpayer: Of course, if the poke is opened and there isn’t a pig there or if the pig is of poor quality or undersized, I can understand that would be embarrassing to the Australian Govt. and many wonderful people would then lose their very important Govt. jobs and that would certainly be a sad turn of events, however, I am willing to risk it to save fifty billion dollars of taxpayer’s monies. Open the poke and let us all see that there is a pig in it, please.”

Australian Govt: “We have bought a pig. The pig controls the weather. We shall control the pig and therefore we shall control the weather by default.”

Mike Borgelt says:
February 15, 2011 at 5:05 pm
“We have an Australian Transportation Safety board modeled on the US NTSB. Ours however has only the resources to investigate 100 aviation accidents and incidents a year. They start with International airlines and work down from there. Private aviation accidents are rarely more than summarily investigated.”
Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. They probably have the NTSB manual that states:
“When in Doubt-Pilot Error.” and let it go….
Personal Experience here…

Meanwhile Australia’s Gillard Labor Government continues trying to sell the carbon tax that it promised at election time it would not introduce. Climate change extremist Tim Flannery has been appointed Climate Commissioner to “better inform” the Australian public about climate change.
Courtesy of Australian Climate Madness Prof. Bob Carter injects some sanity into the debate.

On the hompage, enter info request in the input box . For example, “weather alice springs”. Click on red box with equal sign. The computer them retrieves and displays weather data for the present date from about 1940 if it can find it.

In the section “Weather History” click on drop down menu for addditional selections for display of weather info. Plots of various weather metrics are displayed and other info such as record highs and lows. There is also a short term weather forecast available.

If you select “All”, a plot of the annual mean temperature is diplayed with the OLS trend. For Alice Springs this is really low like almost zero. Note data is from airport.

If no info can be found, a definition about weather and climate is displayed.

With luck the Gillard Lefty government will shoot itself in the foot, loose the support of the three independent M.P.’s keeping them in government and find itself requiring a new electoral mandate before the end of this year.
Take note that the Australian upper house (Senate) will be effectively under control by the Greens from June this year – Australians can shake and shudder at this eventuality.

Australia requires a double dissolution of federal parliament to clear out the rot.

Kyoto was only signed by that deposed idiot Kevin KRudd so that he could big note himself. The general populace never realized that KRudd making this futile gesture would hit them mightily in the hip pocket

How many of the sites around the world have had the data altered? As the whole basis of anthropogenic global warming is on the increases in the tempertures from these sites surely it should be made unequivocally plain that the data are not being manipulated. But is this possible? I agree with others from Australia who have posted here, the Australian government won’t want to know. The current prime minister said just before the election in August 2010 “there will be no carbon tax in my government”. She is now endeavouring to get a carbon tax in place. Is it likely the government is going to approve an audit of the temperature data?

Who is Ken Stewart? What are his qualifications? Has his work been authenticated?

I’d be shocked if there was an audit of the BOM based upon his unsupported claims that the trend in the raw figures for Australia has been adjusted up by 40%. It’s very likely that Ken has simply made an error in his calculations or not understood the methods used by the BOM.

Regardless, it won’t stop a Carbon Tax nor an Emission Trading Scheme being adopted by Australia.

An updated and improved version of the Australian high-quality
annual mean temperature dataset of Torok and Nicholls
(1996) has been produced. This was achieved by undertaking a
thorough post-1993 homogeneity assessment using a number of
objective and semi-objective techniques, by matching closed
records onto continuing records, and by adding some shorter
duration records in data-sparse regions. Each record has been
re-assessed for quality on the basis of recent metadata, resulting
in many records being rejected from the dataset. In addition,
records have been re-examined for possible urban contamination
using some new approaches. This update has highlighted
the need for accurate and complete station metadata. It
has also demonstrated the value of at least two years of overlapping
observations for major site changes to ensure the
homogeneity of the climate record. A total of 133 good-quality,
homogenised records have been produced. A non-urban subset
of 99 stations provides reliable calculations of Australia’s annual
mean temperature anomalies with observation error variances
between 15 and 25 per cent of the total variance and
decorrelation length scales greater than the average inter-station
separation.
REPLY: Oh please, peer reviewed publications are not the pinnacle of truth. I (or anyone else) could write up a paper that would make it through peer review that could be totally wrong. It has happened lots of times. Peer review isn’t auditing, and it often doesn’t do much beyond have a conversation about the merits of the paper. Peer review is an unpaid profession. We get what we pay for.

I get so sick of people like you touting peer review as “truth”, when that peer review often doesn’t even bother with the job of replication. If the peer reviewers of Michael Mann’s paleo-trainwreck had bothered to do replication, climate science wouldn’t be so damaged today. In fact I doubt that Climate Audit or WUWT would even exist had such replication been done.

Martin, Ken Stewart is a retired school principal, but what relevance is that? If his data and analysis are accurate it really doesn’t matter what his qualifications are does it? or do you believe in scientific proof by weight of letters behind a person’s name? Perhaps your time would be better spent trying to verify or contradict his work with analysis of your own rather than sniping about credentials. “Looks pretty flimsy to me” won’t get through peer review… not even Hockey Team peer review.

You’re dreaming if you think the Greens will let Joolya’s new plan through… if she pushes the carbon price or the mining tax she is dead in the water. She cannot possibly balance the opposing factions of the Rainbow Coalition. I would guess that we will have another election in Australia before mid year… and we can get rid of these talentless gits and replace them with a different set of talentless gits… this is how politics works.

They did much adjusting of the raw data apparently.
Steve McIntyre (presumably tongue in cheek): “…a variety of plausible reasons for adjusting 19th century data, pointing out, in addition to the usual problems of changing instrumentation, problems distinctive to rural Australia: thermometers being seized by dingoes, taken by crows and being smashed by angry wives…”:

KRudd747 has just bought himself an AU$3.1mil home in Qld. I am confident he’s not too bothered about what the unwashed masses think.

“Martin says:
February 15, 2011 at 8:17 pm”

Sadly you are right. Gillrd will “put a price on carbon” but in doing so she will end whatever future the ALP and Greens have politically when people start to realise the fallacy of it all and the extortionate increases in the cost of living everyone will bear.

Who is Ken Stewart? What are his qualifications? Has his work been authenticated?

I’d be shocked if there was an audit of the BOM based upon his unsupported claims that the trend in the raw figures for Australia has been adjusted up by 40%. It’s very likely that Ken has simply made an error in his calculations or not understood the methods used by the BOM.

Martin I think you’ll find that the Gillard Labor Government’s main climate change adviser Ross Garnaut is an economist (and as we all know no two economists agree on anything) while the main salesman for Gillard’s carbon dioxide tax is Tim Flannery, an old bones doctor. Now far be it from me to reflect on the qualifications of these individuals, but as we say here in Aussie, mate “fair suck of the sav”.

Given what has happened in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, Sudan, and a few other places lately, don’t be surprised if people start reacting to the stupidity of western governments, their ridiculous levels of personal and business tax; and the enormous debt that governments have burdened themselves with. Soon there will be no money for windmills and solar panels or carbon offsets as many state governments can hardly afford the interest on their debt and they continue to run annual deficits increasing their debt and devaluing their currency. Alternate currencies are popping up everywhere. The US dollar has slid about 30% against the Canadian Dollar over the last few years as US debt grew … and the Canadian dollar is pretty much tied to the US dollar due to trade. China is selling US dollars and moving to currency trade with Russia. The holding by the Chinese of US dollars peaked last year and has been dropping. Japan has reduced its corporate taxes so now the US has the highest corporate taxes in the world according to some sources.

Australia and New Zealand have similar issues. In a couple of years, it is unlikely that Green House Gases will be front page news when unemployment is 20% and people are having trouble putting food on the table. There will be people on the streets telling our politicians that it is time for them to leave office just like people have been doing in the Middle East. In fact, in cold snowy Alberta, both the Premier of the province and the leader of the opposition have announced retirement plans for this year. The public is speaking both demonstrably and quietly all around the world. The bureaucrats should pay attention. The world as we knew it is changing as we sit here typing.

You are correct. Ross Garnaut is Gillard’s climate change adviser, and you are right, he is an economist. He also released a statement recently that CO2 concentrations are “forecast” to double by 2030. Sadly, there are people in Australia who believe CO2 concentrations of 550ppm will result in temperatures 4c higher.

On 12 September 2002 the BOM became a prescribed agency under the Financial Management and Accountability Act. Under the Public Service Act, the Director of Meteorology has the powers and responsibilities of an agency head, and under current administrative arrangements reports to the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities i.e. The Hon. Tony Burke MP Australian Labor Party.

So the BOM answers to government and relies for its funding from government. Hence would you think that it tells government what it wants to hear? – Just a tiny little bit perhaps?

There is a saying in Canberra, never hold an enquiry unless you know what the results are going to be. Any “independent” audit of BOM would only therefore be with some-one like Tim Flannery being in charge of a carbon tax or Dracula let loose in the blood bank.

I’m sure you all know the truism “evil flourishes when good men do nothing”.

Rather than saying nothing can be done, fortunately many people make the effort.

I posted this on Jo Nova’s site on Feb 12 after the appointment of serial alarmist and the absolute guru of failed predictions ,Tim Flannery, was appointed as an “independent” part-time head of another pro carbon tax propaganda effort by the pre-election “no carbon tax under my government” Julia Gillard.

“This is absolutely sickening! At a time when every spare dollar is needed to rebuild homes and infrastructure damaged in recent events and facing imposition of a flood levy and then one of the most useless but costly taxes in our history, the “crying poor” Gillard Government is throwing another $4.5 million away presided over by the hapless and hopeless Tim Flannery.

With consumers struggling to keep up with power prices already inflated by inclusion of costs of so-called ‘energy greening’, this carbon tax will force more households into poverty as prices inevitably rise across the board. Worse, it will have no measurable effect in achieving its’ stated objective of ‘stopping’ climate change.

The real tragedy is that whilst billions of underprivileged people in the world lack clean drinking water, proper sanitation, health care or education, billions of $’s have been wasted by the UN and compliant governments over the last 20 years on promoting and perpetuating what history may well prove to be arguably the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated.

After all that wastage of money and resources, apart from hinting at such an option, not even one of the most rabid activist scientists or environmentalists is able or willing to name or claim a single climate event caused by CAGW.

Can we make Flannery’s appointment the catalyst to help stop all this nonsense once and for all? Exchanging and arguing points of view on blogs all over the world is all very well but we seem powerless against the powerful, well-funded and resourced propaganda machines (supported in the main by the MSM) brainwashing a gullible public.

I still believe there is a vast silent majority out there waiting for leadership and ready to be mobilised, but by the time the worst of the Labor/Green damage to the industry and economy becomes obvious it will be far too late! ”

I can assure all posters that the silent majority in Australia is rapidly stirring but you won’t hear of it through any of our MSM with their pathetic biased headline seekers who used to be called reporters!

Whether successful or not, the herculean efforts of Jo and her associates will be further evidence to a frustrated public that they do have a voice and that people are fighting on their behalf to prevent these abuses taking place. All power to them !!

Lord Oxburgh and Muir Russell, both famous for their ‘independent enquiries’ into the Climategate antics at the University of East Anglia, were spotted this morning at London Heathrow T5 flying together to Australia.

This reporter noticed that they were stopped at Security and several tins of white paint were removed from their hand luggage. ‘But its a tool of my my trade and livelihood’ shouted a clearly irritated peer as they did not fit inside the little plastic bag. ‘My work in in Ashes’ squealed Russell.

The aircraft is expected to arrive in The Colonies (Sydney) tomorrow. Where, no doubt, the dynamic duo will get a rousing Oz welcome from all right-thinking sceptics.

Full marks to Ken Stewart and the battlers who are requesting the enquiry. While the Westminster Model purrs along nicely on rank, titles, privelege and custom in its native climate and has very large tanks to store the required whitewash, the Aussie climate and character can be pretty tough on imported models. I used the word ‘battler’ advisedly as New Zealand comes from similar hardy roots; the Westminster Model had to be modified significantly before it would even run in NZ (the upper house proved to be too top-heavy and was lopped off very early) and the the NZ Climate Coalition has been doing pretty well so far in the NZ courts of justice.
As a footnote, it amazes me how frequently old students of UEA pop up in key but far-flung places.

Please, in the first instance, it is important to regard an audit as a mathematical exercise for confirming or denying current figures; and if discrepancies are found, detailing them for action.

There is no need to go overboard about politics, people, motivations, etc. That type of blogging simply causes confusion of purpose.

The prime purpose is to see if the numbers are a proper reflection of the original records. Since, in an awkward way, increased temperatures equate to increased $ proposals, the audit should be seen as similar to a financial audit. It’s counting, it’s not about attributing motives.

Unfortunately after living in Australia, I do not consider it to be a democracy where people have many rights. Most likely nothing will happen. What I mean is Government in Australia is way to big and powerful to a point where individual freedoms have been eroded to point that such a request as this one will get nowhere. In many ways its a politically correct dictatorship. Sorry…

I’m sure you all know the truism “evil flourishes when good men do nothing”.

Rather than saying nothing can be done, fortunately many people make the effort.

I can assure other posters the Australian public is awakening out of it’s seeming apathy.

Whether successful or not, the herculean efforts of Jo and her associates will be further evidence to a frustrated public that they do have a voice and that people are fighting on their behalf to prevent these abuses taking place. All power to them !!

Tim ‘Ghost Metropolis’ Flannery, new job $180,000 per annum.
If you want a chuckle check out his predictions for Australian climate, made of course at the height of the drought. (search Andrew Bolt/Tim Flannery Predictions)
On a more serious note, the labour government here needs green votes to maintain its coalition but not surprisingly the Greens are not satisfied with what’s on offer. Julia Gillard is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Given the extreme long term fluctuations/cycles of the Australian Climate it is hardly surprising that this is one of the last places in the world where ordinary people still buy the AGW myth. However Aussies are extremely pragmatic people and let’s face it all you’ve got to do here is look out the window to realize that the scaremongers have played their last card. Interestingly it is mostly urban elites who are the true believers…I just love seeing Sydney Melbourne etc getting drenched on the satellite weather and imagining all those ‘greenies’ gnashing their teeth in anxiety!

Do you feel you have more freedom and wealth than in the 60’s and 70’s?
Governments are definately not working for the people anymore. I feel more enslaved to be working for survival than getting ahead for retirement the way governments want to tax us even in death.
The future cannot sustain this pace of debt to the very rich and everyone else will be in debt to live.
So, were is the freedom?

Not really sure the greens can support the carbon tax or the trading scheme.
They know the economic destruction would spell their end.

The same appears to be happening here in Tasmania. Now the state economy is sinking largely due to the collapse of forestry at the hands of the greens.
They’ve realised that without forestry or agriculture to charge against they’ll likely cease to exist.

Anthony and Jo – a word of caution regarding NIWA. Last time I looked, the 7 and 11 station series were still prominent on NIWA’s website. The peer review by the BoM of the 7 station series is also available on NIWA’s website (the adjustments are plainly shown in the review, but there is no criticism of NIWA by the BoM). While there may be the ongoing court action, it has received little or no publicity in New Zealand, and NIWA appear to be just carrying on as always. They have simply hidden their wrongdoings in plain view. The NZ Minister for Climate Change (Nick Smith) is supportive of NIWA and their methods (I have corresponded with him). He represents the basket-weavers of Nelson, and claims to have been a true believer in AGW for 20 years or more.

In Oz, the matter will most likely be decided by public opinion and the vote. The Coalition (opposition) are already ahead in the polls (c. 54 to 46). Gillard and Labor are doomed if she introduces a “carbon tax”, having campaigned on a pledge of no such tax. My guess is that the Greens have overplayed their hand, and that their price for support in both houses was the introduction of a “carbon tax”. While the leader of the Greens is a wily old fox, the newly elected Green senators are young zealots, and I suspect will not understand how or when to back down. The well-publicised claims by the usual suspects that Queensland flooding was caused by AGW (after a decade of claiming that drought was caused by AGW) have not gone down well with Joe Public. I suspect Tim Flannery will have a similar effect once he is let loose.

You people must get you act together in Australia and fire Gillard. If she wins a majority in the next election you’re screwed, you’ll have Cap&trade and who knows what else rammed down your throats. Get organized.

REPLY: Oh please, peer reviewed publications are not the pinnacle of truth. I (or anyone else) could write up a paper that would make it through peer review that could be totally wrong. It has happened lots of times. Peer review isn’t auditing, and it often doesn’t do much beyond have a conversation about the merits of the paper. Peer review is an unpaid profession. We get what we pay for.

I get so sick of people like you touting peer review as “truth”, when that peer review often doesn’t even bother with the job of replication. If the peer reviewers of Michael Mann’s paleo-trainwreck had bothered to do replication, climate science wouldn’t be so damaged today. In fact I doubt that Climate Audit or WUWT would even exist had such replication been done.

provides the rationale and details the methods by which the Australian Climate Record was processed to eliminate errors. It admits that some of the corrections are comparable in size to the real change in temperature. the people who did this work have excellent credentials as climate scientists and mathematicians:

If the people calling for an audit are real scientists, they should be able to read the article and understand what was done. If they doubt the principles that are being used and have better ideas, they could explain what they are and why their ideas are better. From what I have read about this controversy, this hasn’t been done. I have read the blogposts complaining about the temperature adjustments, but have not seen any reference to the papers that were written about what was done and why.

It seems to me that the problem is that people are protesting because the resulting data doesn’t support their beliefs. Unable or unwilling to go to the trouble of understanding what was done, they are asking for an audit, while secretly hoping it doesn’t happen so they can say that they have an issue with the data that they don’t like.

Your complaints about the Hockey Stick paper are wrong. Most Paleo Climate reconstructions , that have been done, since the original Hockey Stick paper, still show a the existence of a Hockey Stick, even though the MWP shows up a more clearly in the subsequent papers. Some of the analysis is done using centered PCA, some of it is done without resorting to PCA at all. Some of it was done without the infamous tree rings. This shows that the criticisms of the original Hockey Stick paper by McIntyre et al were quite immaterial.

McIntyre’s complaint about non centered PCA was actually proven to be incorrect.

I am not sure that you want to continue discussing the Hockey Stick controversy here, so I have omit links which support my position. Debunking the criticisms of the Hockey Stick are like beating a dead horse.

REPLY: Yes, I’m glad you’ve finally comes to the realization that the hockey stick is garbage. You really do need to understand that science isn’t perfect, databases of numbers aren’t perfect, and the need for auditing pervades other fields of science for these reasons. Pharmacology and medicine for example are sometimes corrupted by monied interests just like Climatology which now has billions invested. Climatology should have no exception to procedural auditing. The best thing about his is that its going forward, and there’s nothing you can argue that will chnage that. Be as upset as you wish, condemn it all you want. Your opinion is of no consequence. – Anthony

REPLY: Yes, I’m glad you’ve finally comes to the realization that the hockey stick is garbage. You really do need to understand that science isn’t perfect, databases of numbers aren’t perfect, and the need for auditing pervades other fields of science for these reasons.
Anthony
I think you misread my post. I compared criticisms of the Hockey Stick to a dead horse. The scientific literature has endorsed the Hockey Stick, and McKintyre’s criticism have been proven wrong.

Scientific research is constantly being audited by other scientists. The methods used by the scientists who are developing the scientific data base are endorsed by experts throughout the world.

On the other hand, would be auditors, like Willis Eschenbach have been shown to be mistaken in their objections about certain data. The famous smoking gun at Darwin Zero, is an example.:

REPLY:Tim Lambert, really? Gosh you really will believe anything you read so long as it aligns with your world view, won’t you?
How sad for you. I used to be like you, I thought CO2 was the “only” possible cause. Open your mind, you are trapping yourself. – Anthony

What I like about the comments is the obvious number of Australians now visiting this site. In my daily conversations more people are questioning the whole carbon dioxide is a danger and I believe that more and more will come to do so. There will be a day of reckoning but not soon enough to prevent major economic damage.
Annei says:
February 16, 2011 at 4:02 am
I’m mystified by that map. Is the extreme SW of WA really rated as Subtropical? The last time I stayed there I was frozen; and that was in late November
Yes Annei I was also surprised by the map showing the south of WA to be subtropical. The prevailing winds would surely knock it out of that category.

Unfortunately after living in Australia, I do not consider it to be a democracy where people have many rights. Most likely nothing will happen. What I mean is Government in Australia is way to big and powerful to a point where individual freedoms have been eroded to point that such a request as this one will get nowhere. In many ways its a politically correct dictatorship. Sorry…
——————————————————
You are overstating things a wee bit, methinks. We are far from perfect, but this is a functioning democracy. After the last election, a gaggle of independents, some Green, some not, held the balance of power. If they had thrown their lot in with the conservatives, they would be in exactly the same position.

I have had dealings with the Audit Office over many years. I assure you, they are completely straight and honest, which is one reason why they are chronically underfunded. They get hundreds of requests a year over and above what they are already committed to do. And, they are not an anti-corruption body – it is not in their remit.

While it would be great if they take up this request, if they don’t, it is not grounds for conspiracy theories. Probably a Parliamentary inquiry would be more appropriate anyway, given the political content of allegations against the BOM. The Senate could initiate this at any time – and the numbers are there to do it, until July.

The same appears to be happening here in Tasmania. Now the state economy is sinking largely due to the collapse of forestry at the hands of the greens.
They’ve realised that without forestry or agriculture to charge against they’ll likely cease to exist.

Except that it is not “at the hands of the greens” that the forestry industry is collapsing.

Rather, it is a combination of the high Australian dollar; the coming ‘online’ of huge, cheap, non-Australian eucalyptus plantations; the over-harvesting and poor management practices of the Tasmanian industry; and the desire of Gunns to move its own focus to cheaper sources of material and labour.

The last three causes were in fact predicted or otherwise pointed out by “the greens” a decade and more ago, and had there been a move to more properly manage forestry in Tasmania then, there might be a more robust industry now.

And on the matter of declining agriculture in Tasmania, where it occurs it is because of multinational companies paying third-world compensation for farmers’ produce, or because managed-investment funded forestry is purchasing prime farmland for (poorly-paying) plantations. Again, issues that the greens campaigned against in an effort to prevent – had they been listened to there’d be a healthier farm industry here today.

This shows that the criticisms of the original Hockey Stick paper by McIntyre et al were quite immaterial.

Immaterial?? Funny definition of ‘immaterial’ you are using.

They showed that an ‘iconic’ paper, used by the IPCC as its poster child, that effectively catapaulted an obscure student into a primary place in climatology, and that had passed the much-lauded peer-review, used a deeply flawed statistical method.

And that the results is claimed to have obtained were actually an artefact of the method, not the data. Any old numbers put into the method produced a hockey stick.

The conspirators then out every possible obstacle in McIntyre’s way to prevent their scientific and statistical failure from being made public. Interested readers can learn the whole sorry saga – complete with documented references – in ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ by AW Montford. An excellent book – and a far better yarn than the dry subject matter would suggest.

Rather than being immaterial, McIntyre’s work showed that;

At least one climatologist failed to use the best aviailable statistical methids. Indeed a method that was so flawed as to be useless for his purpose.

Despite this fundamental flaw, the paper passed ‘peer-review’ and was published to great fanfare and acclaim.

Nobody in climatology subsequently noticed these flaws, until McIntyre tried to reproduce the results some years later

The authors refused to allow him access to their original data – contrary to the principles of openness and reproducibility that underpin good science.

I will be charitable and call their actions ‘misbehaviour’. And, along with many other factors, this misbehavior reinforced my sceptical views about climatology and climatologists.

True scientists with a solid experimental case and strong arguments would not need to behave in this shoddy way. And a good review process would have turfed the work out before publication..not ten years after it had polluted the science.

Far from being immaterial, McIntyre’s work revealed deep and fundamental problems with the ‘science’ of climatology. As a ‘science’, it stinks!

One of the truly great things about Anthony’s light touch on moderation gives most of us some real entertainment when posters such as EAdler’s attempt to justify the unjustfiable. ‘Adler’ is German for ‘eagle’, but for some reason I keep getting a mental picture of a turkey whenever I see his name above a post…

Just had a closer look at the map at the head of the article, apparently from Wikipedia. As a few PPs have commented, it is not consistent with the experience of those of us who live here. Is it meant to describe vegetation patterns (eg desert, grassland, tropical?) It doesn’t even work on that level – south western WA is not, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘sub-tropical’. The northern half of the NSW coast (described as temperate) probably is.

This shows that the criticisms of the original Hockey Stick paper by McIntyre et al were quite immaterial.

Immaterial?? Funny definition of ‘immaterial’ you are using.

They showed that an ‘iconic’ paper, used by the IPCC as its poster child, that effectively catapaulted an obscure student into a primary place in climatology, and that had passed the much-lauded peer-review, used a deeply flawed statistical method.

And that the results is claimed to have obtained were actually an artefact of the method, not the data. Any old numbers put into the method produced a hockey stick.

The conspirators then out every possible obstacle in McIntyre’s way to prevent their scientific and statistical failure from being made public. Interested readers can learn the whole sorry saga – complete with documented references – in ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ by AW Montford. An excellent book – and a far better yarn than the dry subject matter would suggest.

Rather than being immaterial, McIntyre’s work showed that;

At least one climatologist failed to use the best aviailable statistical methids. Indeed a method that was so flawed as to be useless for his purpose.

Despite this fundamental flaw, the paper passed ‘peer-review’ and was published to great fanfare and acclaim.

Nobody in climatology subsequently noticed these flaws, until McIntyre tried to reproduce the results some years later

The authors refused to allow him access to their original data – contrary to the principles of openness and reproducibility that underpin good science.

I will be charitable and call their actions ‘misbehaviour’. And, along with many other factors, this misbehavior reinforced my sceptical views about climatology and climatologists.

True scientists with a solid experimental case and strong arguments would not need to behave in this shoddy way. And a good review process would have turfed the work out before publication..not ten years after it had polluted the science.

Far from being immaterial, McIntyre’s work revealed deep and fundamental problems with the ‘science’ of climatology. As a ‘science’, it stinks!

Sorry but McIntyre’s work was entirely wrong. He used centered PCA incorrectly and got a different result from Mann and Bradley, because he used the wrong criterion to pick the number of PCA’s to approximate the data. When the proper number of PCA’s is used, it is found that using non centered PCA’s as Mann and Bradley did, or using the customary centered PCA method get the same results.

From the link above it is clear that McIntyre’s mistake has been known for over 6 years by now. Maybe it is time that you faced reality, and recognized that McIntyre was mistaken in his claim about the role of non-centered PCA in creating a false Hockey Stick.

One of the truly great things about Anthony’s light touch on moderation gives most of us some real entertainment when posters such as EAdler’s attempt to justify the unjustfiable. ‘Adler’ is German for ‘eagle’, but for some reason I keep getting a mental picture of a turkey whenever I see his name above a post…

Alexander,
If people have factual or logical arguments to make, they don’t have to resort to insults to persuade reasonable people of that their position is correct.

“If people have factual or logical arguments to make, they don’t have to resort to insults to persuade reasonable people of that their position is correct.”

I have made numerous factual, logical arguments showing eadler that CAGW is not happening. Conclusion: eadler is not reasonable. QED

eadler also says:

“Maybe it is time that you faced reality, and recognized that McIntyre was mistaken in his claim about the role of non-centered PCA in creating a false Hockey Stick.”

McIntyre & McKittrick were correct. I can prove it: since they debunked Mann’s Hokey Stick, the UN/IPCC has not dared to use it in their publications. Instead, they use the lame spaghetti graph, which lacks the visual impact of the Mann Hokey Stick.

The IPCC would have lost whatever remaining credibility it had if it continued using Mann’s debunked chart. And the IPCC loved Mann’s phony chart! The IPCC would never have stopped using it if they had not been forced to drop it due to Steve McIntyre’s work.

When McIntyre showed how Mann had hidden the specific [“censored“] data that would have destroyed the hockey stick shape, Man’s dishonesty was revealed to the whole world.

And to this day, thirteen years after the hockey stick first made its appearance, MBH98/99 have never publicly archived their data, methodologies and metadata. They are climate charlatans, exposed by Steve McIntyre as being devious and dishonest frauds, and they deliberately ignore the scientific method. When eric adler attacks McIntyre it is based on adler’s psychological projection — the stock in trade of the cognitive dissonance afflicted.

The adjustments of temperature had been questioned by the skeptics who called for the audit. The reasons for the adjustments were endorsed by the auditors, who said that the original raw data was available to the public.

At each of the seven locations there have been changes in specific climate station location over time. When you create a long time series by adding information from each of these station locations together, you have to make adjustments to account for these changes.

There have been various changes in location etc over time at each of the seven locations making up the seven station series. In order to create a long time series at each location, it is necessary to merge temperature records from a number of specific sites have been merged together to form a long time series. When merging different temperature records like this, it is necessary to adjust for climatic differences from place to place or significant biases would be introduced. Adjustments may also be needed even if the site does not physically move, because changes in exposure or instrumentation at a given site can also bias the temperature measurements.

Why do you need to adjust the raw data?
Long time series of climate data often have artificial discontinuities – caused, for example, by station relocations, changes in instrumentation, or changes in observing practice – which can distort, or even hide, the true climatic signal. Therefore, all climatic studies and data sets should be based on homogeneity-adjusted data.

That is what NIWA climatologists have done in the seven station series, and the seven individual station review documents outline the adjustments.
The raw (original) climate station data have not been changed and are freely available on the NIWA climate database, which means that the NIWA seven station series can be easily reproduced.
REPLY: Very soon, adjustments, like “snow”, will be a thing of the past. – Anthony

Since I don’t want to take up space repeating the above post, I will just answer the points that were made.

1) The fact that I disagree with Smokey is not proof that I am not reasonable.
2) McIntyre made many errors in his critique of the Hockey Stick, paper, including improper use of the Principal Component Analysis. His claim that the Hockey Stick was an artifact of non centered PCA was wrong, and proper use of centered PCA, and even omission of the PCA step gave a graph similar to the original Hockey Stick.
3) The fact that a different graph is used for the earth’s temperature graph is not due to McIntyre’s criticisms, but rather due to research that has been done since using additional proxy data. The graph is still a Hockey Stick with more noise during the MWP than the original. The conclusions are still the same.
4)Finally the original MBH data is archived at this publically available web site: